Growing old
by TheWind11
Summary: Katniss kept every Sunday of her entire life for going into the woods, and save 20 minutes just to sit on her and Gale's rock. She grew old, wise, and she forgive. Complete. Oneshot. No pairing. Not AU. Post MokingJay


As years were passing by, she healed. She never forget, she never forgive the capitol for what it did to her, to her family, to her friends, to her neighboors, to her lover...the her homeland. Years after she returned to district twelve, it never really ended. She never really got out of the arena. She came to understand, that that's how it works. Your brain, your soul, your heart will never totally leave the arena. She came to understand, that, maybe there war her place to be. Like Finnick said, none of the became a victor by chance, maybe exept for Peeta, because he was never meant to be a victor. Not Haymitch, not Mags, Beete or Wirres, not Johanna not even Annie. They were all crazy, their mind lost long back in their Games.

She learned how to live with it. She never let the memory of the tributes she had known vanished. The unusual power of Thresh and Cato. The skilled hands of Clove. The beautiful voice of Rue. The power of Marvel, the beauty of Glimmer. And all that. They died so that Snow would fall. They died with a scope. She knew it.

She never really understoond Haymitch. His pain. All that he had to go through in all those years of mentoring. His fatherly love for her and Peeta. But some nights, when only the two of them were walking in the woods, their bottles filled of alcohool drinkings, the finally manadged to talk about their games. And they learnt that, one of the reason Victors can't let go of their games is because they're affraid to talk about them. He told her everything, every single tribute he knew, Mayselee, the girl that almost killed him, he told her about his familly, his lover, his friends, about all the tributes he had to send to the games, and she told him everything she had gone through, everything she felt. And she thanked him. Because he was her friend, her mentor, her father.

Her father...her sister..and Finnick, and she cried.

She eventually come to marry Peeta. They had kids. He baked, she hunted. She hunted, and every Sunday, for over fifty years, she kept visting her and Gale's old meeting place. She still kept his bow and arrows, and the blanket that they hide under the rock when they were younger.

After fifty years, she thought back, happily of the beautiful moments they shared in the woods...their woods. She had always loved him ,but she was just a poor, shaken, brokent teenager and she couldn't understand her feelings. Now, at the age of sixty-six, she knows that it was not love that brought her and Peeta togheter. It was fortune and destiny. She knew she would have married Gale, if it wasn't that curest...no, not cursed (she eventually understood that it is the sacrifice of a few so that many can live happily ever after) that unfortunate day when her sister's name was extracted out of that traig bowl.

She gaze into the sunset, the bow in her hands. Back home, Peeta and the grandchildrens are waiting for her. She never really lost her abillity to shot. It decreased, yes, but never dissappeared. And she is peacefull now, she understand how Mags felt. She now belived that old saying „Time heals everything". Because people forget...their memories fade like a picture's powerful colours fade after ages.

And when she looks up and see the decrepit body of her old best friend, she smiled. She knew that, one day, he would return. That's why she took three hours of every Sunday of her lifetime to go in the woods, and 20 minutes to just sit on their rock.

She always knew she loved him, in a way only two survevours can love eachother. But they were old now. They grew appart, and this doesn't matter for any of them. After all this years, all she can see in him is the boy she found in the woods at the age of 11.

-Gale...

-Catnip...

No one called her like that in fifty years. She slowly got up and hug him. A hug between two old, damaged human beings. And, for one moment, with the orange sky between them and the disk of the sun getting lower and lower, they lived the life they never got the change to live.

(And then they hunt, and he comes home with her. And Peeta is not surprised, because he, himself, got old. And he knew it.)


End file.
